Chapter XVII

For the past ten years the situation of Europe has been both grotesque and tragic. Had she made her exit from the stage of world-politics with the gesture of tragic dignity that marked the downfall of the ancient Roman Empire, had she been overwhelmed by a new wave of barbarians, the historian of to-day might have a more pleasant and profitable task to fulfill. But unfortunately nothing of this came to pass, nor did Europe really recover from the death-blow of the war. Since 1921, when the French armies marched into the Ruhr, she has become like a patient suffering from shell-shock who acts irresponsibly and has no coherent purpose in life. Apart from the tenuous hope of a League of Nations which has not been able to prevent fresh combinations of power, such as have been clearly revealed by the various naval pacts, nor fresh outbursts of rabid nationalism, such as France, Italy and various Balkan nationalities have displayed, Europe has done little, either morally or politically. Of the two new world-philosophies offered her, she has chosen neither.

The American world-philosophy, in the ultimate form that it has taken since the close of the war, is a rough-and-ready simplification of the far more complex but equally individualistic social philosophy of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln. It exalts the physical liberty of the individual at the expense of his general social and moral responsibility. Immediately after the close of war, the labour situation in America became again acute. The great industrial trade unions, realising the immense part they had played in carrying the Allied effort to a successful conclusion, had long begun to agitate for an overthrow of the existing form of government and for such a seizure of power as had been effected in Russia. The American system of democratic capitalism, reverting into the hands of the great industrialists and their allies and servants, set itself to the task of destroying this opposition. Its two outstanding means were mass-production and coöperative capitalism. It set itself to the task of manufacturing more quickly and of giving the worker a share in the product. Thereby it created a new prosperity and a standardised happiness. Any protest became in the eyes of its leaders a crime against true Americanism. To enforce this unalterable Americanism upon the immense masses of citizens of foreign descent, it was necessary to stop the flow of immigration; and this was promptly done. To prevent the country lapsing into a state of sheer moral anarchy, such as was foreshadowed by the post-war revivals of the Ku Klux Klan, the fierce recrudescence of race-hatreds cutting athwart all sections of American life, it was necessary to concentrate solely on a more intensive development of that industrial prosperity that had characterised the war years. The South was industrially invaded as well as the North, the East and the West became more firmly linked together by the great money and manufacturing interests. Finally, to ensure that the reëstablishment of the country was to be permanent, on the old basis of complete aloofness from both European radicalism and European idealism, it was necessary to stifle or suppress freedom of spirit, freedom of thought, freedom of public utterance, and to concentrate altogether on the immense material achievements that America had already accomplished--the improvement in living conditions, the provisions of schools, hospitals, roads, and scientific inventions for all sections of the population. Accordingly, the study of American patriotic views became an important part of school curriculums. Anyone who thought otherwise than these views taught, must either hold his peace or accept exile and poverty. During the years that immediately succeeded the war, a new body of American intellectuals again took the road to Europe, not to mention those who were forcibly cast out upon Soviet Russia.

The Russian world-philosophy, as formulated by the leaders of the new Bolshevik régime, was also a comprehensive simplification of what was formerly a much more complex social position. It skilfully provided an outlet for public enterprise, while maintaining the power in the hands of a specially chosen and selected class. Unquestioningly the Bolsheviks accepted the postulate, which America had been foremost in proclaiming, that all power derives ultimately from the lowest ranks of the people, from the peasants and factory workers. This happened also to be the postulate of Karl Marx, and accordingly Marxism became a new State religion to take the place of the old, which had delegated this power of the people themselves into the hands of the Czar and of the Orthodox Church. But in its application to the situation created by the Russian débâcle, this dogma proved to be just as much of a check upon free activity as had all the old restrictions of the Czar. It exalted the moral and social responsibility of the individual at the expense of his physical liberty. Everyone, whether Communist or not, must henceforth behave in the way laid out for him by the heads of the Communist party, who though representing an even smaller proportion of the entire people than the American Wall Street magnates, nevertheless had now all the power in their hands. The masses would be fed, housed, educated, on condition only that they did not undertake counter-revolutionary propaganda, and the Communist Secret Service was there to enforce this law, on penalty of death or imprisonment, against all who attempted to modify the existing political system. A new revolutionary army, recruited among the peasants, and backed by firm discipline, arose to take the place of the old; but the field of its activity was to be limited to helping the foreign proletariat to overthrow their own capitalist Imperialist governments, and to maintaining Lenin’s system intact at home. All foreign influences, whether in the shape of very limited concessions to foreign capital, or works of art with a definitely anti-communist tendency, were to be severely supervised and ruthlessly suppressed. Thus freedom of activity outside the bounds of the Communist dogma became as impossible in Russia during the years after the war, as freedom of thought outside the bounds of the Capitalist assumption became in America. The underlying aim of the Russians became to create an army of young Lenins; that of the Americans to achieve a million Henry Fords.[8]

It is quite obvious that none of the European nations could whole-heartedly accept either the American or the Russian solution. To follow the Russian idea out in all its logical implications meant the suppression of the Parliamentary régime to which Europe had been accustomed, and the transformation of all the European countries from constitutional monarchies to proletarian dictatorships, in which the will of a single man, or a small committee of men reinforced and balanced through the establishment of local advisory councils controlled all industrial production. To carry out in detail the American idea, it was necessary for Europe to abolish all gradations of rank and responsibility, such as a constitutional monarchy implies, and to concentrate entirely on demagogic parliamentarism, backed and controlled by the industrial interests which have everything to gain from an increase of individual production and prosperity. To follow out this ideal proved quite as impossible for Europe as to Russianise their existing populations. The traditional conservatism which dreads a complete break with the past, the already established forms of social, moral, and religious usage, and the lingering remnants of nationalist pride and sentiment, stood everywhere in the way. Only in one country, Italy, was the combination effected of proletarian demagogy and autocratic dictatorship. Thanks to a chapter of accidents, Mussolini and his henchmen took over the rule of that country from the hands of the conservative Catholics and the anti-clerical Liberals alike. For the rest, the European countries tended to fall into the same alignment that had been theirs upon the first appearance of America and Russia upon the stage of the world. Western Europe, led by England and reconstructed Germany, tended to become more and more American and parliamentary; Eastern Europe, under the leadership of Italy, Hungary, Poland, tended to become more and more arbitrary and swayed by the dictates of revolutionary militarism.

2

The modern world, which we are examining from the perilously close range of participators in, rather than spectators of its effort, is essentially the fruit of two streams of influence, emanating from beyond the European frontier, and expressing themselves logically in the solutions of the social problem which America and Russia have found. These two streams of influence have been at work upon Europe, and in a different way upon the Far East, for at least two centuries past. At the present moment they are rapidly approaching their culmination. In order to understand this culmination it is necessary to turn aside from the field of outward political action and to state, as far as such things can be finally stated, the fundamental psychological characteristics that go to the making up of what may be called the typical Russian and the typical American.

The Americans, taken as a class apart from Europeans or Asiatics, tend to have no interest whatever in thought for its own sake. Their special delight is not in thought, but in purely physical activity. This refusal to think maturely, to speculate even remotely about the ultimate problems of the world and of humanity, has frequently led European observers to characterise the American people as a young nation, a nation not grown up. But it was possibly quite as evident in the days of Washington as it is now; the only difference being that it has by now grown a dominating characteristic of all parts of the country, whereas in the early stages it was confined mostly to the frontier, and obscured from view by the influence of the better-educated colonial seaboard settlements, still under the spell of European ways of thinking. The whole course of American history may be summed up as the history of the spread of the pioneer and of his type of mind into every department of human effort. The pioneer type is always a man too busy with cutting away virgin forests, building roads, cultivating land, opening mines and factories, inventing machines, making automobiles, gambling with stocks, devoting himself to social “service,” to stop and ponder upon the æsthetic values of art and religion, or the metaphysical problems of human destiny. Such questions cannot enter into his pragmatic scheme of material effort directed towards immediate ends. For him the sheer delight of making suffices, not the value of the thing made. So habitual, so universal has this cult of activity for its own sake grown to the Americans, that it is constantly employed by all ranks of the people as a substitute for thought. The American uses leisure itself, not as a valuable opportunity for self-examination, but only as a stimulus to some new kind of activity. Sports and games, travel, book- and picture-collecting, education itself, become for him simply fresh pretexts for employing some more of his surplus energy, for taking part in some new form of mental distraction. For example, the European lecturers who annually go to America in such great numbers may be under the illusion that they are somehow guiding or directing the American mind into more fruitful channels; their American audiences are under no such illusion. Their aim is at the best merely to rapidly get firsthand information about some new fact that puzzles them; at the worst, to momentarily accept the lecturer’s own views as a substitute for creative and independent thinking of their own, whereby they share the illusion that they are actually participating in some form of human thought-process.

Even when the American is in repose, he must somehow feel that his body, if not his mind, is exerting itself. The fundamental symbol of American life is not, as many observers have held, the skyscraper, with its busy activity, nor the athletic field with its gladiatorial baseball and football games, nor even that puritanic symbol of the pitcher of melting ice-water which makes its inevitable appearance equally upon the tables of the humblest lunch counters and the desks of bank presidents and statesmen. The true, the classic American symbol is the rocking-chair. It symbolises alike domestic comfort, and nomadic restlessness. In the rocking-chair one need not speak and yet one must continue to move to and fro. In the rocking-chair activity becomes a soothing narcotic, and absence of mental purpose a stimulus to further effort. The rocking-chair removes all the necessity for the contemplation of the great cosmos of justice and injustice, truth and falsehood, beauty and ugliness, to plant man firmly in the lesser cosmos of his personal individuality, his simple animal “reaction” to practical truth. In the rocking-chair one can “loaf and invite one’s soul” for an endless journey. The goal does not matter. This is true on every weekday, and on Sunday the activities of the rocking-chair are supplemented by the Sunday newspaper supplement, providing another substitute for thought.

On the other hand, the Russians, as opposed to the Americans, tend to have very little interest in physical activity. A fund of Mongolian inertia, concealed at the roots of the Russian character, probably accounts for this; but it is impossible to understand the tragic disorder of many Russian lives,[9] as well as the strange crisis of feverish and misdirected fury that traverse Russian history, unless we admit at the outset that the Russian is in some way prejudiced against activity for its own sake. If he undertakes activity at all, it must be for some object that lies beyond activity. Thus we find the Russian peasant becoming a tramp in order to “save his soul”; the Russian intellectual indulging in all forms of drunken debauchery in order to acquire the “experience that is necessary to an artist”; the Russian Czar making war on Oriental or European nations in order to prove that he is “by the Grace of God, leader of Eastern Orthodox Christianity.” Nor has the Russian Revolution brought about any change in this state of affairs. Lenin himself, although he displayed while in power a quite remarkably un-Russian ability to make rapid decisions, owed his advent to power largely to his ability to hold his ground without altering his position. His own pedantic and doctrinaire Marxism shows, no less than his stoic fatalism, the fact that mere obstinate adherence to a theory was to him more important than practice, for many years before the moment that he suddenly found Russia at his feet. And Lenin owed, though perhaps he himself would never have admitted it, a great deal to the fiery Jew, Trotsky, who was profoundly un-Russian, indeed American, in temperament. The Revolution owed its success entirely to a few clean-cut practical actions thrown athwart a raging torrent of unpractical ideas and theories; Lenin and Trotsky rather saved Russia from herself, than created a new Russia. And since the Revolution the stream of endless discussion of theoretical ideas, has merely flowed on, like water under a bridge, leaving the structure of the state intact. A wise and witty French observer, Luc Durtain, who has seen Russia since the Revolution, has remarked that the Russian conversation is, in times of food shortage, in itself equal to meat and drink.

What, then, is the specific symbol of Russian life? It is not the immobile gleam of the ikon in the corner of the house, nor the strangely drifting, tentative and slow-gathering mass-demonstrations of the people, nor the oddly mechanical governmentally-ordered demonstrations, nor the curiously vivid splashes of gay and exotic colour that contrast with the sombreness of the landscape. The specific symbol of Russia is probably the samovar. Ready at all times of the day and night to provide hot water, it stimulates but does not nourish, like the endless Russian conversations. It is the essential element of every Russian social gathering, and yet at the same time is only a pretext for meeting and wasting one’s energy in talk: as much a pretext as Moscow, Russia itself, life, or the Universe in Russian eyes. It does not provide tea in itself. For that a teapot is still necessary. It only provides the hot water that may be used or not to produce tea, as you will. In short, it is as perfect a symbol of inactive power as anyone is ever likely to find. And, like Russia herself, it has fire in its belly: fire hidden away from too prying eyes, under an outward shell of servility and conformity.

3

The conflict that is being fought out to-day between America and Russia is a psychological one. It is a subjective conflict between two opposed conceptions of the destiny of mankind, rather than an objective conflict between armies and directly political aims. And the two fields of its activity are the European and the Asiatic world.

Both Russia and America have achieved within their borders what to them is the perfect mode of existence. They have arrived at the Utopian state of complete optimism and confidence for the future. Despite the activities of one set of European prophets, the Soviet system has not broken down. It is more secure, after ten years, than the system of Czardom that it replaced. Despite the activities of another set of prophets, American democratic capitalism has not broken down either. It apparently possesses inexhaustible reserves of prosperity and energy. But Europe, scarcely recovered from the horrors of its own internecine struggle, cannot follow the course of either country. Europe is like the ancient Hebrew monarchy divided between the imperialist tolerance of the kings of Israel and the narrow particularism of the kings of Judah. To the working classes the Russian solution, in its trenchant logic, immediately appeals; but this drives the capitalist classes only further towards embracing the ideas of America. To the intellectuals, the American solution is a monstrous vulgarisation; but this only means that they must either become reactionary, or accept the revolutionary message of Russia. Europe, caught between the intellectual and moral millstones of two great powers which were originally of its own creation, but which have gone their own ways without accepting the nineteenth century compromises, is awaiting a new political Messiah with a clear message; hence the popularity of such a figure as Mussolini. But whether Europe, in its decadent cosmopolitanism, will ever achieve anything resembling the unity of which its poets only dreamed, is doubtful. It is far more likely to pass, by gradual infiltration of influence and direction, completely under the sway of the United States.

But it is not only in Europe that the world-struggle is being waged. The balance of power, ultimately, lies in the Far East, and its enormous reserves of natural resources and of population. And during the past ten years the Far East has shown clearly the direction it proposes to follow. It is ready to accept the material achievements of the West, without in the slightest degree altering its own racial and social traditions. Thus it is ready to turn the weapons of the West against the West itself, while remaining at heart far more akin to the spirit of non-individualistic fatalism which has successfully guided Russia. The most outstanding example of this recent development in the East is Japan, which in the words of a modern Russian writer, “wishes to take her machinery from America, her spiritual culture from Russia.” China and India are likely sooner or later to take the same path, thanks to the awakening of Asiatic racial pride, actively fomented by Europe’s glaring administrative blunders and internal political divisions.

4

The parallel lines that we have drawn between the two great frontier nations are now complete, and the whole world finds itself in the dilemma of having to make either a choice or a compromise between the ideals of America and of Russia. At the present moment, the tendency is probably towards a compromise of some sort, the war years and post-war years having too profoundly shaken mankind. But this tendency is only temporary, and is due to the slow disappearance of the generation that lived through the crisis of the war, a generation that emerged from the conflict profoundly sceptical of itself and of others, and incapable of the supreme unreason of an absolute creed.

If Russia succeeds in consolidating its moral gains in the Far East, while America no less succeeds in its clever policy of economic penetration into Europe--a policy to which European newspapers, theatres, hotels, shops and social usages are gradually but unmistakably responding--if these two achievements come about, another world-conflict is almost certain to take place before the close of the twentieth century. For between an industrialised and proletarian East and an industrialised and plutocratic West, the population problem will rapidly become as acute as it already is in Japan. Nor will the sporadic and necessarily individualistic propaganda of birth control mend matters here. Under the present conditions controlling this propaganda, the better, finer and more harmonious sections of the population simply tend to die out, while the lower, baser, and least intelligent, go on increasing--thus destroying the aim of eugenics and inverting the true course of human evolution. This inversion of evolution is now powerfully aided by the mushroom-like growth of industrial capitalism, ready to exploit the lower levels for its own purposes, and also by all so-called “religious” propaganda, which has unfortunately always an equally “practical” end in view, whether directed by the ideals of Communist Bolshevism, Catholic Ecclesiasticism, or American Rotarianism. Thus the only hope for avoidance of a conflict between the two forces loosed on the world by Russia and America, becomes some shadowy proposal for complete disarmament, or the limitation of competitive industrialism and the breeding of a new aristocratic élite to control the economic and social life of the various nations. Such a proposal lies apparently outside the sphere of “practical” politics, and only the idealist philosopher Plato has dealt fully with its implications.

The fact that most intelligent Europeans have come to despair of the prospect, and have practically abandoned any further attempt to control the two opposing forces let loose upon the world, is shown by the extraordinary revival, within recent years, of intellectual interest in the eighteenth century. Such people realise that the nineteenth century, with its compromise between materialism and idealism, failed to liberate humanity, so they yearn to go back to a happier, more harmonious time, before instinct and reason conflicted, when neither Russia nor America interfered with the course of human existence. This movement towards the eighteenth century is however merely a final gesture of world-weary romanticism, impotent to create any new values for humanity. It cannot postpone by a single day the conflict that is increasingly approaching between the unloosed forces of America and Russia.

The only factors that may prevent that conflict from taking on an acute phase in the not distant future, exist not in hyper-intellectual and creatively sterile Europe, but in Russia and in America themselves. Russia’s attempt to get the East completely on her side by stirring up the Asiatics against the Caucasians may perhaps prove abortive, for the reason that the heads of the Communist party take at the same time no pains to conceal their immense contempt for all forms of transcendent and organised religion save their own. This side of Bolshevik propaganda may possibly fail to appeal very strongly to the other-worldly millions of the Orient. At the same time, America’s effort to control Europe through intensive financial and economic penetration may possibly fail because of the inferior intellectual character of the envoys she sends to Europe, or because Europe may still place a higher value on leisure, culture, and beauty, than upon any of the energy-wasting devices America has to offer her. But apart from this, there seems very little doubt that America and Russia are destined to bulk more and more largely in the world’s affairs, until the inevitable clash between them takes place. Europe has no longer the economic force nor the creative will to resist America. Asia has no longer the spiritual fervour nor the unified faith to hold back Russia.

If such a conflict as we have envisaged should take place, what would be the result? The crisis of the European war would simply be repeated on a larger scale. Russia, together with her Eastern allies, would possess incalculable reserves of man-power; and the fact that the Soviet Republic has shown a determination to maintain in existence a highly-efficient and disciplined army of considerable numbers, would give her an initial advantage, in case the first attack in the opening stages of the contest came from her side. But America and her European allies would undoubtedly possess a preponderance of machinery, greater financial resources, and a far superior naval and aerial force. After the first year of battle, their effort would only increase, while Russia’s effort would almost necessarily diminish. Russia’s only hope would be in a short rather than in a long war.

On the other hand, even should the Western Allies hold the coasts of Russia, together with the Far East, in a complete blockade, a Russo-Mongolian combination could continue the struggle almost indefinitely. The immense reserves of food, land, and man-power at the disposal of the Soviet war lords would insure this. Russia cannot be completely beaten by a blockade (even when that is aided by internal famine) as the Allies found out in 1919. Nor can she be beaten by land-invasion, as Napoleon found out in 1812. The only hope for the West of obtaining a decision in their favour would be to invade and terrorise Russia through the air. Such a campaign, if the West had sufficient preponderance in the air to carry it to a successful conclusion, might eventually lead to an admission of physical defeat on Russia’s part. But hers would nevertheless remain a moral victory of enormous importance to the future of the human race.

The dangers of a war of this nature, especially if the forces engaged are anywhere near equal, can scarcely be overstated. The recent European war gave those who took part in it a faint foretaste of them. There would be continuous bombing of enemy capitals, communications, granaries, food and munition depots. Armies would operate at enormous distances from their base of supplies, with resultant tension and spirit of mutiny ready to flame up every moment. Ocean-going submarines would defy the blockade, and spread death and destruction on the high seas. Governments might have to meet and be conducted from secret places underground in order to escape destruction from poison-gas and other lethal weapons. Spying and counter-spying would be universal. Such a state of affairs might well lead the world rapidly back to a state of sheer anarchy, and undo in a few years the finest effort of five thousand years of civilisation. The break-up of the Roman Empire, or the recent chaos in China, offers but a feeble picture of what such a world would be like. The end of such a conflict might well be such a state of famine, disorder and exhaustion as to leave no hope to mankind for the future.

Under these circumstances, the duty of every intelligent Russian and every intelligent American of to-day becomes clear. Since salvation is not to be looked for either from the old civilisations of the East nor from the more recent European civilisations; since both are now rapidly and inevitably in decay after their last great creative period (which was the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, rather than the eighteenth or nineteenth); since, above all, no revival of unified religious faith is to be looked for either among the Western Christian sects, or the great Oriental religions, we must either find some hope of salvation in ourselves, or admit our defeat, and with it the ultimate defeat of mankind. Step by step, inch by inch, we must oppose the tides of Bolshevism and of Americanism that are now sweeping over the world. We must save America and Russia from themselves. That is our mission and our purpose. But how can we fulfil this mission that our time--perhaps the most tragic time in all human history--imposes upon us? We can not fulfil it separately, for that is a task beyond the powers of any single man, or body of men. We must strive to inform both America and Russia with a purpose alien to their whole historical development. Against these two attempts to impose on mankind a purely mechanical and material conformity, we must uphold, perhaps for the last time, the values of an ideal and supra-physical unity of spirit, not of function, of a humanism that is at once scientific and æsthetic, and of a world outlook that reconciles both man’s desire to achieve “the good life” for himself on this planet, and his overwhelming sense of awe and wonder at the superhuman processes of the universe. Perhaps this task is altogether beyond our feeble and intermittent powers. Yet it is the one remaining task left to humanity to accomplish in our age. And after all, it is a problem that only education can solve, and we must leave it to the teachers to accomplish. It is Russia, not America, that needs an Emerson to lead it towards individual self-reliance. It is America, not Russia that needs a Dostoevsky to show it the value of common submission to the mysterious powers that govern the development of all spirituality.

_April 1927-August 1929._

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The list that follows is not intended to be exhaustive. To cite, for example, all the literary works of the authors discussed in Book III would be a wearisome and a fruitless task. The list here given will be found valuable to the student who seeks to expand his mental horizon by reading further on the topics discussed in these pages.

_GENERAL WORKS_

A History of Russia, by Sir Bernard Pares. 1927.

The Oxford History of the United States, by S. E. Morison. 2 vols. 1927.

Main Currents in American Thought, by Vernon Louis Parrington. 1927.

Vol. I. The Colonial Mind (1620-1800).

Vol. II. The Romantic Revolution (1800-1860).

A History of Russian Literature to 1881, by Prince D. S. Mirsky. 1927.

Contemporary Russian Literature, 1881-1925, by Prince D. S. Mirsky. 1926.

(These two books contain valuable bibliographies of works
translated into English.)

Panorama de la Littérature Russe Contemporaire, by Vladimir Pozner. Paris. 1929.

The Decline of the West, by Oswald Spengler. 2 vols. 1926-9.

Essai sur l’Inégalité des Races Humains, by Count Arthur Gobineau. 2 vols. Paris. 1884.

The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, by Henry Adams. 1919.

The Law of Civilization and Decay, by Brooks Adams. 1921.

The Revolutions of Civilization, by Flinders Petrie.

History of Religions, by G. F. Moore. Vol. I (Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, etc.). International Theological Library, 1914.

The Amarna Age. A Study of the Crisis of the Ancient World, by Rev. James Baikie. 1926.

The Emancipation of Massachusetts, by Brooks Adams. Revised and enlarged edition with new Preface. 1919.

Middletown, by Robert S. and Helen Merrill Lynd. 1929.

The Golden Day, by Lewis Mumford. 1926.

_WORKS ON SPECIAL TOPICS_

George Washington, the Image and the Man, by W. E. Woodward. 1928.

Catherine the Great, by Katherine Anthony. 1925.

Hawthorne, by Henry James. (English Men of Letters Series) 1879.

Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic, by Raymond M. Weaver. 1921.

Whitman, An Interpretation in Narrative, by Emory Holloway. 1926.

Walt Whitman, by Basil de Sélincourt. London. 1914.

Dostoevsky, by André Gide. Paris. 1923.

Tolstoy as Man and Artist, by Dmitri Merejkowski. 1902.

The Ordeal of Mark Twain, by Van Wyck Brooks. 1922.

Stephen Crane, by Thomas Beer (with a preface by Joseph Conrad). 1923.

Anton Chekhov, by Leon Shestov, 1916.

Woodrow Wilson, by William Allen White. 1926.

Woodrow Wilson: A Character Study, by R. E. Annin. 1924.

Lenin, by Valeriu Marcu. 1928.

Geist und Geschichte der Bolschewismus, by Réne Fülop-Miller. 1927.

L’Autre Europe. Moscou et Sa Foi, by Luc Durtain. 1928.

FOOTNOTES

[1] The threat of pogroms has by no means disappeared under the Bolsheviks. See Luc Durtain’s “L’Autre Europe” for details.

[2] His mother’s name was Rachel Levine. His father is unknown. Mrs. Levine might have been a Christian married in a Jewish family but the name of Rachel is not common among Christians.

[3] This statement may perhaps be questioned by some Catholics. Apparently, Catholics are not allowed to undertake missionary activity in Russia. But the church cult has not been suppressed.

[4] This same image was recently removed by the Bolsheviks, apparently without any opposition whatever. Such are the paradoxes of Russian history.

[5] A notable exception is the sermon in Melville’s “Moby Dick.”

[6] Isabel F. Hapgood. Introduction to “Taras Bulba.” New York, 1915.

[7] It has been estimated that during the fifty years between 1870 and 1910, America added to her previous population of forty million, twenty-five million foreign settlers.

[8] See on this point, “The Diary of a Communist Schoolboy,” by S. Ignatyev. Also “American Prosperity” by Paul M. Mazur.

[9] For example, the life of Pushkin or of Dostoevsky.